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IVR: Emerging Technologies

By TMCnet Special Guest

The wheel. The cotton gin. The steam engine. These items were considered emerging technologies in their day and signified huge milestones in the history of technology. Any innovation that serves a vehicle for improving daily lives and livelihood by making activities faster, more accessible or more streamlined can be considered a modern technology.

Throughout modern and pre-modern history, innovations have occurred that have signified great progress in technological development. Modernization can be reflective of psychological, sociological, anthropological, economic and even political trends.

Interactive voice response systems have benefitted and will continue to benefit from this type of technological convergence. According to Wikipedia, “Various converging technologies have emerged in the technological convergence of different systems evolving towards similar goals.” [1]

Technologies that were previously unrelated often times converged to make a more functional, valuable product. Emerging and converging technologies offer new innovations that improve productivity and increase revenue. Some popular examples of technological convergence are smartphones (web surfing and telephone functionalities), tablets (word processing, email processing, web surfing and entertainment) and Skype (News - Alert) (telephone functionalities utilizing VoIP ).

Voice technology and interactive voice response have benefited extensively from technological convergence. Voice data can now be stored on remote servers securely, anywhere in the world. Voice applications can interface with social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook (News - Alert) via application programming interfaces so that social media can be utilized with voice recognition. IVR systems can interface with onsite database systems to create, route and qualify call flows.

Emerging and converging technology essentially serves to combine two previously disparate technologies into one device, program or operating system with enhanced working ability at great benefit to users. Specifically in the IVR realm, technological innovation is virtually endless, and speech recognition can often times be integrated on various platforms, in many different mediums.

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